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Wanted: Dead Review

Wanted:Dead Review (PS5)

Wanted: Dead is a love letter to the PlayStation 2 era of action games with over the top battles, mechs, and characters that are beyond absurd. Unfortunately, Wanted: Dead doesn’t leave behind some of the major issues of the sixth generation of gaming as you are constantly being plagued by invisible walls, unavoidable deaths, frame rate stutters and monotonous combat.

Hack and Shoot

Wanted: Dead starts off strong with an interesting alternate history where humanoids are part of everyday life and how that has shaped the geopolitical landscape. You play a Hannah Stone, mercenary for hire, who is currently serving a life sentence without parole, but only she and her Zombie Squad can help in a quest to uncover a corporate conspiracy in a plot that feels ripped right out of a cheesy 90’s action flick. Despite the game being self aware, the members of your team are extremely over the top and unlikeable and not in a Suicide Squad anti hero way. You don’t want to root for them, instead they just lack depth.

Occasionally, the cutscenes are done in anime, which is well done and should have probably been done for all the cutscenes because the character models look janky and the dialogue feels stiff. If all of the cutscenes were done in anime and were dubbed Cantonese or Mandarin, it would have shown a commitment to the story they were trying to tell in CyberPunk Hong Kong and it also would have taken attention away from the aspects of the game that weren’t great.

Luckily, just like the games it’s trying to emulate, the story and characters are background as Wanted: Dead is focused on combat and trying to breathe life into the hack and slash genre. Wanted: Dead has some good ideas but ultimately falls short in many areas where the industry has moved on. It’s a fine line between trying to be a faithful recreation of games made twenty years ago and making smart quality of life changes.

Wanted: Dead consists of sectioned off battle arenas that allow you to mow down waves of enemies with your blade and sidearm. Wanted: Dead tries to incorporate long range firearms, however ammo is fairly sparse and enemies are bullet sponges, so for most of the game you will be in close quarters. If firearms did more damage, this would increase the strategy of the game ten fold

Combat First, Variety Second

The biggest highlight of Wanted: Dead is the executions that make you feel like Mr Wick. The game features around 50 different executions, which means that you don’t get bored by seeing the same animation repeated. Sadly, the executions can only carry the combat so far as Wanted: Dead offers no strategy for the most part when approaching a new battle ground. You don’t have to decipher the room in an instant and figure out what the best plan of attack is because all of the enemies are clones.

Instead you just mash on the single attack button as it lacks a light and heavy attack. You can mix in sidearm shots, which interrupt enemy attacks, but they also interrupt your flow, which leads to janky looking fights. My biggest issue with the combat was the lack of Z-Targeting or lock-on ability that became common practice in 1998. This leads to constantly losing your intended target, getting hit from behind and attacking the wrong person or missing altogether.

The violence is also extreme as you slice limbs clean off and detach torsos at the waist. This would have been a lot more satisfying and immersive if the enemies reacted to certain damage. Why doesn’t an enemy react differently when I slice his arm off when this technology has existed for decades?

All of this slicing and shooting rewards you with skill points that you can put into your skill tree in either offence, defence or utility. In theory this allows each player to approach the game based on play style, but none of these upgrades truly alter the game in many meaningful ways. One of the best upgrades was to double the window for a perfect parry as the window for perfect parry never felt natural to me like it has in recent games like Sekiro, Elden Ring, Fallen Order, or Metroid Dread just to name a few.

Visually, the bosses and mini bosses are a very welcome change. They also require a different strategy than the rest of the clones you have to get rid of. Unfortunately, bosses can be added to the list of under baked ideas as the bosses are not difficult, they are just unfair. Death is common, but not in a learning way as the bosses have minimal or no attack patterns to decipher. When you add this to the unforgiving checkpoints, frustration sets in quick. When you finally escape victorious, you don’t get that hard earned victory feeling that you should, instead you are just thankful it’s over.

Another missed opportunity was with the mini games that could have served as a nice palette cleaner from being drenched in blood. Mini games like claw vending machine, karaoke, and a rhythm ramen eating game just felt uninspired, repetitive and lacked an addictive quality. This should have been a nice respite from being Kirlkand John Wick but instead was another idea that didn’t fully pan out.

Wanted: Dead or Alive

The attempt to create a game so bizarre in today’s era where higher budget games play it safe is commendable. Wanted: Dead has the foundations of something that could have been quite good and with a little more development time and some gameplay changes, it could have been a cult classic. Retro slasher fans might have an excellent time with this but gamers who a looking for a more modern and polished take that will move the genre forward will be left Wanting: More.

Soft 6